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The papers barely reported on it. That was ironic, in its way -- the mysterious massacre-with-no-bodies from earlier in the month, staged by Pollux and Castor, had taken place in an abandoned newspaper warehouse, after all. So perhaps the news was just allergic to this place.

Or perhaps, like they'd suspected for a while, the Negaverse had its claws sunk in all the local news outlets.

Or perhaps -- they simply didn't know what to make of it.

Hvergelmir stood outside the old printing warehouse, drawn to it in spite of herself. She hadn't been back since that first night -- since the Dioskuri, as they were calling themselves, had taken a hatchet to all her hard work in convincing the Negaverse that no one was trying to go to war with Earth. Since Alois had rejected her and Kairatos, and the meeting with Titan had gone nearly as badly, too.

She lingered here, and wondered why. Her occasional youma patrols had never taken her this far out of the theater district -- but her feet had carried her here, all the same.

It was quiet -- but she could still feel the squish of wet blood between her toes, the soggy weight of it in her shoes. She wondered how loudly those lieutenants had screamed for their lives. This was a remote place, and well soundproofed -- there was no one around to hear.

Hvergelmir stood across the street from the big, dark building, its doors shut and barred with lines of ragged police tape.

Something had changed here, that night. The empty old building was empty no more, not really. Now it held ghosts -- and they were frightened young lieutenants, slaughtered with nowhere to run, and they had no bodies here to return to, to lay to rest. Their families would not know closure.

She didn't want to go inside. She didn't think she could. She just -- stayed there. Staring. Wondering what they were all supposed to do next.

Hvergelmir looked up at the sound of the voice. A Lieutenant -- and not a green-looking sweet-faced teenager like little Astrophyllite. This was a woman grown, in her twenties for sure -- and her Negaverse uniform looked more like Chaos had organized a biker gang than an army. She wore red-piped black leather, clinging everywhere, and a bustier that (thought it was hard to tell from her angle down on the ground) seemed to indeed call attention to just how much bustier she indeed was than the average person. From her black hair to her red lips to the dangerously high heel of the boot she had perched on the roof's ledge, this woman looked every inch what Laney's mother might well have described her as.

Trouble.

Hvergelmir felt her skin prickle a little with an unfamiliar feeling she couldn't place. Fear, or something like it. Adrenaline was certainly there. Maybe it was nerves, she decided, worn thin by the taut anxiety she'd felt in the past few weeks since Castor and Pollux's incident. Maybe that was what was making her unusually jumpy.

Because of her position -- her oath -- even though she was a squire, lieutenants were still very real threats to her, especially given her historically poor showing in live combat. But away from her bench, in a place where blood had been spilled, beneath this woman's red gaze, she felt all the more vulnerable.

"It's just a dress," she said, nerves frayed and exhausted. Her voice was only just loud enough to carry the distance -- she wasn't feeling at her best. "I haven't come for a fight -- I'm a noncombatant, I had no part in what happened here. Will you come down?" she asked, trying to keep her voice polite.

She wanted the woman to come closer -- it was intimidating, having her hovering over Hvergelmir's head like that -- but she didn't, too. But she did. She was tired -- and standing here, she didn't want to have to do the same old razorblade dance again just now; putting on her best job interview manners, trying to figure out what kind of sales pitch a particular Negaverse officer might want. Everything felt too dangerous in this place, with so many ghosts watching -- and her tongue felt leaden and impossibly heavy in her mouth.

It was always strange, to see someone performing inhuman feats of physicality. Even knowing she was capable of it, Hvergelmir had never tried to leap merrily off of a building like it was a four foot drop. This woman had been, what, two or three stories up? She looked like the fall hadn't even crossed her mind as dangerous.

It was that, probably, and the sudden nearness of her thick, dark aura that made Hvergelmir catch her breath. Up close, her eyes were terrifying and too bright, and their rich, scarlet color reminded her too much of pooling blood. Without realizing it, Hvergelmir took a single step back, then stood there, unaccountably transfixed.

The woman was tall. Even on the ground, she still towered over Hvergelmir.

"I'm not interested in being the norm from my side," she countered softly, golden eyes staring.

It was something in the water they were obviously drinking in the Negaverse, Hvergelmir thought a little wryly, that made them like to play Big Bad Wolf and feel perfectly obliged to touch her without her permission. This knowledge, of course, made neither act any less effective -- the obvious threat inherent in you would make a nice return message still sent chills up her spine; the soft glide of fingers over her shoulders still made her knees go a little weak. That was fear. Fear, definitely -- nothing else. Nothing to do with this woman and her black leather.

She felt very small, though, encircled within the dark-haired woman's path. Very small and brittle and -- just as the lieutenant had suggested -- easily broken.

"I choose to be vulnerable," she said, wrapping her arms around herself to ward off an imagined breeze. "I know the risks." Hvergelmir glanced away, trying to concentrate on anything that wasn't this woman and her long strides. The ghosts in the warehouse seemed to glance back.

"What's your name?" she asked without meeting the lieutenant's eye.

Cinnabar. A warm name, a red name -- like the woman herself.

Even with the long-nailed fingers of one of Cinnabar's hands drawing attention to her deep red lips, it was hard to miss the movement of her other hand, reaching to fiddle with her corset in some way -- mainly because when a woman starting fiddling with her cleavage, it was hard for anything else to compete with that for attention. Hvergelmir didn't understand what the lieutenant was up to, but she hadn't missed it entirely -- gaze flicking away curiously to the top of the leather corset before coming back to red lips and a pretty face.

You can call me Sin. Looking at her, Hvergelmir didn't doubt it.

The juxtaposition of Cinnabar's words to her behavior was -- distracting, as were the little accidental (?) brushes of her knuckles in the wrong (right?) places, settling the warm bolero chivalrously around Hvergelmir's shoulders. (The enhanced visuals of Cinnabar sans bolero didn't help matters, either -- now she was all corset and leather pants and warm, perfectly toned, nicely displayed flesh.) Her bolero smelled like her skin must've smelled, up close.

It was Cinnabar's offer that made Hvergelmir realize something she'd previously dismissed as basically impossible: she was being hit on. She was being hit on by this woman. This woman was hitting on her.

Women like this didn't give Laney the time of day. No one, actually, gave -- Laney wasn't the kind of person people thought of that way -- and Hvergelmir even less so, surely. Hvergelmir was a ninny that people treated like she had just come back from her First Holy Communion and probably still needed a babysitter and a bedtime.

Cinnabar's attentions were flattering, but frankly, she remained pretty sure they were actually impossible. The lieutenant was just mocking her. That made so much more sense.

(Still...)

She could feel how red her face was, how loud and fast her heartbeat had sped. "No," she breathed. "I'm not a slave or a soldier. I can't." But instead of asking what the second option was -- not that she didn't know, of course she knew -- there was only ever one second option, with the Negaverse -- she looked up at Cinnabar shyly, through her lashes, and said, "S-same offer, to you."

It was funny, the strange little places Hvergelmir's mind went. Cinnabar latched onto her throat, pulling her up onto her tiptoes and then a bit higher, and while the squire's physical reactions made plenty of sense -- her hands flew up to her throat, her fingers started clawing at Cinnabar's to try and pull herself free -- her mind, instead of concentrating all its marshaled energies into devising a plan for escape and survival, decided to mix in some unhelpful commentary on the situation instead.

Mocking me all along -- well, that much I knew. Suspected. Knew, deep down.

Infos -- is that their information branch, or their infiltration branch? Should I be flattered? Frankly, given how much the Negaverse prizes information, I'm pretty sure a small, nicely shaped rock could do well there.

Of more immediate concern, of course, was Cinnabar's imminent desire to end Hvergelmir's life, compounded with the at-best-uncomfortable sensation of being held aloft by the neck.

Someone with combat training, like Cinnabar, was clearly capable of fighting effectively above her rank. While Hvergelmir had more energy, more power, to bring to bear in a battle, Cinnabar had more experience and started from a baseline physical state obviously more suited to it. This leveled the playing field somewhat.

Still, Cinnabar may have been pound-for-pound stronger, but a squire's speed undoubtedly made Hvergelmir at least faster -- and her own reactions needed no particular training, in this instance.

Cinnabar was taller and stronger than Hvergelmir was. Even at a higher rank, she was having trouble prying her fingers loose. But human legs tended to be longer and stronger than human arms; so, rather than trying to reach out with her own hands to shove the lieutenant back, Hvergelmir brought her foot up to try and plant it against Cinnabar's rib cage and forcibly push her off that way. A move that was likely to put her at a disadvantage, certainly -- but considering that her immediate concerns were suffocation and a second hand aimed right for her starseed, anything was bound to be an improvement.

The disadvantage of not having much combat experience was that, once you started flying by the seat of your pants, you were pretty much stuck there the entire time. Every time you spackled together a solution to an immediate problem, you tended to immediately find yourself hurtled into a new and different resulting problem.

In this case, Hvergelmir's move succeeded in dislodging Cinnabar's hand from around her throat -- but the loosed hold combined with the pressure she'd just been exerting immediately had a new result, which was that her momentum left her toppling backward. She hit the ground backside-first, air leaving her lungs in a pronounced, "Oof!"

So now she had a new problem: she was on the ground. It was a terrible place to fight from. Her personal trainer was going to kick her very bruised butt for this.

Speaking of which, unfortunately, one of Cinnabar's beautiful black boots was heading directly for Hvergelmir's ribs. The squire put her hands up -- with what she would later assume, reflecting on her actions, was probably some kind of attempt to catch the other woman's foot and stop her attack somehow -- and managed to distribute the force of the agent's strike across her two hands and the side of her rib cage. The sharp spike of a stiletto heel found its mark, catching flesh and leaving behind long cuts that tore through a long stripe of cloth, her side, and the palm of one hand.

Hvergelmir rolled back and scrambled to her feet as quickly as she could manage, coughing heavily. Between the initial choking lift, the fall to the ground, and the swift kick to her midsection, she was having trouble catching her breath.

"I won't --" she huffed, steadily stepping backward as she drew her distaff and spindle out of the air. " -- do -- Metallia's dirty work. If I have to -- kill people -- to live -- I'm not -- trying hard enough."

Thread spun between her fingers, bringing her magic crackling to life.

Hvergelmir watched as Cinnabar was cast into bright white and shadowed relief. The other woman was ever a capable fighter -- in the face of what amounted to an extended flash grenade detonation, she fell immediately into a defensive posture and put up some cover for her vision.

"I don't call this asking," she rasped, voice still not completely back up to snuff.

Then -- hoping the distraction of temporarily impaired vision would be enough to buy her some time to effect a good escape, Hvergelmir spun on her heel and ran for her life.